Jada Pinkett Smith Talks Being ‘Extremely Suicidal’ Early in Her Career

Jada Pinkett Smith continues to share some of her toughest moments on the latest episode of Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk. During the show centered on mental health, the actress revealed that she was “extremely suicidal” after suffering a “emotional breakdown” early on in her career.

“I had an emotional breakdown that definitely, I feel like, affected my mental stability,” the Girls Trip star, 47, said. “I had gotten to L.A. and gotten a certain amount of success and realized that that wasn’t the answer … that that wasn’t what was going to make everything OK.”

“Actually, it made things worse. And I became extremely suicidal and I had a complete emotional collapse,” she continued.

The Baltimore native said she was around 20 years old when she suffered her breakdown, and recalled calling her mother and co-host, Adrienne Banfield-Jones, in a panic.

“It’s like when you just don’t have control over emotions, your thoughts — you feel completely and utterly out of control,” Smith explained. “I don’t even think at that particular point in time I understood what I was going through. Now, I know that it was what people would consider a nervous breakdown.”

“You cannot manage yourself,” she added. “Every moment of the day, you’re talking to yourself, trying to keep yourself on track… (trying to keep yourself) from hurting yourself, trying to (keep others) from realizing something’s wrong, but they know something’s wrong, because every minute I was just bursting into tears and didn’t know why.”

“I was severely depressed, severely. And that was something that I battled with for years,” she went on. “Waking up in the morning was like the worst part of the day.”

Pinkett Smith says now she no longer suffers from depression. “I also think that I had to uproot some false beliefs,” she said. “I had to just let go and just come to terms with just what life is.”

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